Exam

Requirements to sit the exam

During the duration you sit the exam, you must have access to a stable internet connection for pushing to gitlab and receiving emails.

This exam is covered by UNSW's Fit-to-Sit policy. That means that by sitting this exam, you are declaring yourself well enough to do so and cannot later apply for Special Consideration.

If, during an exam you feel unwell to the point that you cannot continue with the exam, you should take the following steps:

1. Stop working on the exam and take note of the time
2. Make contact immediately with cs6771@cse.unsw.edu.au and advise them that you are unwell
3. Immediately submit a Special Consideration application saying that you felt ill during the exam and were unable to continue
4. If you were able to advise cs6771@cse.unsw.edu.au of the illness during the assessment, attach screenshots of this conversation to the Special Consideration application

Date, Time, and Duration

The primary final exam will be a 3.5 hour exam that begins at 2pm (AEST) and ends at 5:40pm (AEST) on Friday 12th August .

The supplementary final exam will be a 3.5 hour exam that begins at 1pm (AEST) and ends at 4:30pm (AEST) on Friday 9th September.

Students outside of Asia-Pacific region, or students with ELS requirements, may have their exam time altered and communicated to the lecturer in charge privately. If you have been given alternate instructions about start and finish times, they apply.

Only submissions made during your exam time window will be counted as valid.

Exam Structure

The exam consists of two questions:

1. An easier question that is algorithmic and requires using just the STL containers and a little bit more.
2. A harder question that requires writing reusable library types with templates.

The exam will be entirely automarked, and there are no marks associated with style, best practices, or testing.

There are marks associated with having properly linted code, however.

Platform to complete exam

The exam will be distributed via Gitlab, and operationally be very similar to the release and submission of a single assignment repo.

The exam must be completed via vlab or locally. Regardless of where you complete the exam, you must:

• Ensure you push the work you want submitted to your gitlab master branch
• Ensure that your code works as expected in the vlab environment

Technical issues relating to your local environment are not grounds for Special Consideration.

Do not leave it to the deadline to push your code to master. Submit each question when you finish working on it.

Communication & Help during the exam

• This exam is an open book exam, meaning you are able to use the internet and other resources.
• Whilst you can use resources on the internet, you cannot copy or plagiarise those resources. Code snippets found on websites, with or without attribution, are considered plagiarism.
• You are prohibited from seeking help from other students during the exam. Any communications (physical, digital) after you or another person has started the exam time is not allowed.
• Even after you finish the exam, on the day of the exam, do not communicate your exam answers to anyone. Some students have extended time to complete the exam.
• Do not place your exam work in any location, including file sharing services such as Dropbox or GitHub, accessible to any other person. Ensure during the exam no other person in your household can access your work.
• Your zpass should not be disclosed to any other person. If you have disclosed your zpass , you should change it immediately.

Deliberate violation of exam conditions will be referred to Student Integrity as serious misconduct. This may result in a 0 for the course, and further Academic Penalty.

If you have questions or clarifications needed during the exam, you can make a !! PRIVATE !! post on our usual forum (linked in sidebar). Do not message lecturers or tutors on MS teams. Do not email lecturers or tutors about issues that are not of a sensitive nature.

When posting a message to the forum, it's important that you are detailed in your description of your issues. If you are having technical issues:

• Make sure your most recent code is up on gitlab
  
• Show screenshots of the issue (code, terminal, etc)
• Explain how you produced it
• Whether you're running it locally or in vlab

Failure to comply may result in delays in responding to your queries.

Clarifications made during the exam will be made at the top of this page. After each clarification, an email will be sent to all students in the course notifying them that a clarification has been made.

Submission

There will be no submit command for the final exam. At the end of the exam time, whatever code is on your latest commit pushed to your master branch (on gitlab) will be what is submitted and marked.

Troubleshooting

If you are having issues working on the exam at CSE, please follow these steps

• If you're using VLab: try leaving VLab and reconnecting. You will likely be put on a different server, which may make your connection better. If the problem persists, try using SSH instead: instructions here or here
• If you're using VSCode: Try disconnecting from VSCode, then changing the URL from vscode.cse.unsw.edu.au to vscode2.cse.unsw.edu.au .
• If you're using SSH: try disconnecting and reconnecting.
• If you're having disk quota issues, try deleting every folder related to this course except the exam repo.

Preparation

• Complete the sample exam found here . No solutions will be released, but you can ask questions on the forum.
• Review previous tutorials and assignments to stay confident with both theory and practical elements of the course.